Letterbox Caves
We don’t know why we’ve come here, we don’t know how we’ll leave. When our paths converged, we reached for each other without a care for the crosswinds. Now we can’t let go. Don’t sit there by the stile, you haven’t the time in your life. The mind can’t comprehend all this shattered rock.
Have you seen the wrens who make their homes in the letterbox caves? Do they know it’s only pelts of moss and roots of pioneer birch holding the quarry tips together? Too quick for the eye, wrens will survive the collapse, don’t you think?
I like to notice the yellow. Gorse isn’t obviously inviting but if you risk a prickle you’ll be rewarded. Coconut, can you imagine? I like to glimpse the time before. Reminds me to hope for an after. Time to move on now. The ravens don’t wait for carrion, we’re told. They call foxes to open the bodies of those who have surrendered.
Catkins, look. Male and female still perfectly in tune. A shame about the bees. Can the wind pollinate? I used to know so many things about the world. That was a different world. The ground is no longer the ground, they say, just an intermediate layer in how we have been stratified.
All this slate formed south of the equator. The last bare peaks rise out of a plate that drifted north from tropical zones… If it’s a kind of return we’re experiencing, I think I’m all right with that. I wish it weren’t so fast.
Lichens are the first to colonise inhospitable lands; their decay after death formed our early soils. Stuck on the outside of spaceships, in legions they died in tests. We never did find out whether they’d survive on Mars.
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First published in Lemon Tree Writers 30th Anniversary Anthology 2023